Desertification in Europe [antikvár]

PREFACE Despite the fact that Spain already finds itself on the UNO map of desertification, when mentioning the subject of desertification in Europe the most usual reaction is well that embodied in the title of Prof. Mensching's paper : "Desertification in Europe ?", and according to the various interlocutors the question mark may express any nuance from candid astonishment to perplexity and beyond. Most of the problem concerning the acceptance of the concept of "Desertification in Europe" is semantic in character. "Desert" as a place where sand dunes roam about with hardly any vegetation and no water is the mental picture one generally gets. Yet "desertification" is no desert : it is, as the suffix -ication clearly indicates, a process, of which a full desert is one end, a healthy ecosystem being the other. It is a degradation process which deserves being studied in any of its phases because of the dangers involved. When the cost of the restoration of a Land to its former productivity is higher than whatever net gain may have been obtained at the price of the decrease in productivity, one has to acknowledge that some precious resources have been lost, irrespective of the fact that rain may fall and certain plants still grow. Something has to be abandoned, deserted, and that is desertification. The definition of "desertification" has been the object of many discussions. Normally, and quite understandably, the various definitions found in the literature reflect more their authors' concern and scientific interest rather than an inquiry into the actual meaning of the word itself. We would venture to suggest that Rapp's definition ("the spread of desert-like conditions in arid and semi-arid areas up to 600 mm, due to man's influence or to climatic change") is the one which best fits the concept we are discussing. The rainfall limit set by Rapp is easily seen to include most of Southern Europe. The human component is the key to the obse r'ved;; d i f f e rence in conditions between, say, Greece and Sahel. -The cliniatic component is a warning that man's activities may in the\]end be unable to avoid passing the point beyond which the process is no Longer reversible. The papers c-ollected in this book provide evidence that the continuous lo'ss.of fertile soil is a constant in at least the Mediterranean"Europe. The problem is not new. As the Symposium on European Desertification took place ;jn Greece, it is becoming to evoke that' greatest among men, Plato . In Critias, 111, b-d, he gives a picture of ancient Attica. He says that "many and remarkable floods have occurred The mass of soil which descended s'teeply from high places did not expand, as it does elsewhere.'/ in terraces, and its great flow rolling down unceasingly was finally lost in the deep. Since then what remains, '.as one can see it in small islands, offers, when comparing- the present conditions to those then prevailing, the image of a body that a sickness has made skeletal, once all that I owe to A.T. Grove that my attention has been brought upon this passage of Plato.